Reality-bred celebrities hold a place of their own in mass culture, but those who grew up watching the American network show ‘To Catch a Predator’ in the mid-2000s will vouch dearly for just how popular and magnetic its host, Chris Hansen, was.
Hansen and his close-knit team were famed for luring child predators from the virtual world into the real one and getting them arrested by cops positioned secretly outside ‘bait houses’. An online vigilante group would fish out those predators — predominantly middle-aged white men — while a TV news unit, geared up with hidden cameras and microphones, documented the whole activity from eerily close quarters.
The group also boasted actors who posed as underage individuals on online chatting groups, and much of To Catch a Predator’s success is believed to be in the element of shock of discovering that the abusers were actually unassuming, seemingly respectable members of society — including teachers. Just as the predators grabbed the bait, Chris Hansen would emerge from the grainy shadows of a television to let them know that their fates had been changed forever. The theatricality was a huge part of the deal and as Lance Oppenheim makes a strong visual suggestion in the opening scene of Primetime, Hansen literally descends a majestic staircase to announce himself as a grand purveyor of justice.
A question of perspective
Primetime marks the feature debut of Oppenheim, who originally found his groove through acclaimed documentary work. The 30-year-old filmmaker has strongly revealed his inclinations to tap into American subcultures that are guided blindly by consumerism, fantasy, technology, and even the online and offline media and his films are psychological explorations that consider very distinctive vantage points. Primetime is one such stellar showcase of perspective, as Oppenheim confidently relegates the predators to the background and instead places Chris Hansen in the foreground for a macabre dance with fame and sanity.
Indeed, it is almost as though the cameras and audio equipment are covertly placed to plumb the depths of this new sensationalist TV journalist and not the predators walking into a damning trap. Hansen is portrayed with a calculated finesse by Robert Pattinson, whose all-American boy-scout appearance creates a facade of trustworthiness and responsibility. Yet, well beyond those TV impressions, perhaps, lies a self-serving, detached soul that feels way more interested in seeing those ratings climb than bringing about a systemic change around him. Hansen perhaps initially set out to do the latter, but Primetime suggests that the hyper-competitive, condescending world of network television forced him into becoming a ruthless, unrecognisable version of himself.
Yet, given how the narrative revolves around Hansen’s choices, Primetime doesn’t still award him all of the spotlight. The film is written by Ajon Singh, who is evidently more fascinated by an opportunistic ecosystem that welcomes people of different temperaments — from dedicated ‘activists’ looking to effect genuine change to naive actors hoping to make a mark with their performances — without ever overtly forcing them to take the opportunity. It’s that push-and-pull at the end of the day for everyone involved in the “mission” — including, and especially, Hansen — because the door is always left ajar for them to quit and walk away, yet the chance to create history under the guise of being noble is simply too tantalising to resist.
A paradigm shift
The film’s strongest merit, among many, is that it creates that cultural juncture that its people feel is too significant to pass up, with each one of them believing that they are at the forefront of a paradigm shift. Just as Dan Plomb, the said aspiring actor (played by Skyler Gisondo), gaslights himself into believing that he must use the stage to prove how good a performer he is (even if the audience is the background crew and a handful of friends back home watching him on TV), Hansen’s producer Andie (played with expertise by Merritt Wever) convinces herself that she is made for dark reality TV, rather than the kind that wants to spread optimism (performatively so, still) among audiences.
Hansen himself wants to beat the hit TV show Lost in the primetime race and it doesn’t matter to him one bit that his network’s chief dislikes his show; the rush he feels when a fan confesses to him that he is “doing god’s work” turns out to be superior to anything else in the moment. His personal life might be crumbling, and evil — the very thing he thinks he is cleansing the world of — might be appearing to him regularly in a physical form, but he will not and cannot stop himself from going after the biggest fish ever caught by his show.
That fish happens to be Bill Conradt, the assistant district attorney whose actions — both prior to and during the taping of the show — decided the fate and memory of To Catch a Predator. Those who are aware of how the real-life encounter transpired would perhaps expect it to be the fulcrum of the film, but Oppenheim isn’t one to take that sentimentalist route. Primetime doesn’t hesitate to clearly indict its sexual perpetrators, but it wishes to be an exposé of a culture that willingly operates on questionable ethics, even if it outwardly desires to be altruistic.
The real-life Chris Hansen is said to have had issues with how he is portrayed and one wouldn’t be very surprised by his disapproval. The Hansen we get to see on the screen is intentionally not well-rounded and rather a caustic symbol of the idea of getting consumed by one’s own hype. There are other movies and series already made to honour the victims as well as challenge the sensationalist practices of shows like To Catch a Predator. The latest movie, though, is about posing the question of whether there’s a predator lurking in all of us and there aren’t any easy or clear answers here.